These forums have been archived and are now read-only.

The new forums are live and can be found at https://forums.eveonline.com/

Market Discussions

 
  • Topic is locked indefinitely.
 

Character trading questions
Author
Previous Topic Next Topic
Achee Mo
State War Academy
Caldari State
#1 - 2011-11-29 01:54:14 UTC
Character Trade

I have been interested in expanding my trade scope to character trading, and have been browsing the forum for a while. I have a few questions for those with experience in this field.

1. Pricing

While I do understand that character appraiser is not the final answer to everything, I noticed that quite a few people use this tool as a reference point. What puzzles me though is that many characters are being sold at equal or less value than what the appraiser says, not to mention some being sold under the plex cost required to train the amount of sp. 

Combine this with the transfer cost, I am not sure if character trading is profitable at all.

2. Calculating target sale price

At the moment i am thinking 

Months needed to complete target skills training x Plex price + transfer cost. 

I can see certain types of character being profitable minus transfer cost, but once i factor in transfer cost the margin seems very low, to the extent that I think I may be better off using the isk for other long term speculative investment. 

3. Appeal

What appeals to me though despite all this is that character trading seems to be akin to savings with low but stable interest. E.g. Pay 480 mil per plex for 6 months and end up with slightly profitable lump sum in the end. Am i seeing it correctly?


Anyways, tl/dr - is character trading worthwhile? :p Any tips and pointers you guys could give me?

Thank you in advance.
Ilinea
Sebiestor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#2 - 2011-11-29 03:52:50 UTC  |  Edited by: Ilinea
If you get your hands on a character that has to be sold fast and getting lesser bids in that time
OR
not having gained the attention it deserves, for whatever reason (it might be a day nobody looks in the forums)
OR
for any other reason you get a well-trained char for a bargain...

... then it might be profitable.

I haven't done character trading myself. But I would still say, two characters with the same SP can have a completely different value depeding on factors like:

- Are people looking for specific characters at the time and this causing some specific skills to be more desirable over others?
- Are the skills trained mostly specialized in a specific direction or is it a hybrid?
- Are people maybe not interested in all skills trained, making some of them for the bidders less worth?
- Are skills trained to levels trained, that are unnecessary or not making sense?

Possibly some more things come together depending on everyone's situation. Very High SP specialized chars, if they are more rare could be a lot more worth... unless bidders couldn't afford them. Sometimes the sellers ask too less or too much, doing harm to their bids. Or some bidders might look on a characters value based on the possible return of their investment into an alt. Luck or bad luck.

You have to account for all those things that can influence prices one or the other way.

They told me to mine... and I started to mine, the market ;)
Abdiel Kavash
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#3 - 2011-11-29 22:05:23 UTC  |  Edited by: Abdiel Kavash
Character trading can be quite profitable. I knew a person who made tens of bilions by buying so-so characters, training them for a month or two to fill in the gaps, and selling them as fully specialized. Also think about, for example, pre-patch speculation (buying chars who can fly the new shiny thing coming up and reselling after the patch).

Character training, as in, train a char from scratch and then sell - probably not. The effort needed to do this is minimal, so the profits won't be huge.
Achee Mo
State War Academy
Caldari State
#4 - 2011-11-29 23:03:38 UTC
Thanks for all the inputs - there is certainly a lot to consider and i guess thats part of the draw. I will definitely look into it more and probably follow the route of buying a starter character and specialising. This should be fun. :)